


Taken

by mstigergun



Series: A Dream of Fever and of Fire [2]
Category: Marco Polo (TV)
Genre: "Hashashin", "The Fourth Step", Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Sad Feelings About Dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 16:49:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mstigergun/pseuds/mstigergun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marco’s is a traitorous heart, fitting the child of a smuggler with more concern for coin that his son’s well-being. He thinks on his father’s transgressions, and yet Marco finds himself unable to to anything but scramble to save the man who has stolen from him his freedom, his hopes, what little name he has made for himself in Cambulac. It is a sacrifice Prince Jingim cannot understand.</p>
<p>Building on “The Fourth Step” and “Hashashin,” with liberties taken.</p>
<p>  <i>"Only a fool asks to be sent on a task equal parts unlikely and dangerous, and then on behalf of someone so beneath his consideration."</i></p>
<p>  <i>Marco thought, And if you but knew who held my consideration, you would think me a greater fool still. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Taken

**Author's Note:**

> A stand-alone, I think, but it builds on the foundation of the previous work in the series, "Fevered." Marco is conflicted about his father. Jingim is perplexed, in the way that princes who always want to appear utterly collected are perplexed.
> 
> Find me on tumblr here: [WriteTheCalendar](http://writethecalendar.tumblr.com). I love making new friends, so don't hesitate to chat me up!

The list of things his father has stolen grew longer with each passing day, like the slow drawing down of a stalactite, a gradual sharpening to a point keen enough to pierce skin and bone. The inevitability did not make escape easier; instead, Marco found himself pinned, helpless beneath the weight of all that Niccolo had done and not done. When he finally realized the entrapment, felt the weight like of the mountain hovering over his breastbone, it was with a quiet hopelessness as unrelenting as it was sickening.

The sins of the father were enough to become the sins of the son. Marco had never thought himself a thief, but he was blackened by the schemes of his blood. Another thing taken him from him, as subtle as the slow crawl toward dawn with nothing but prison bars and cold stone around him: his name and what it had come to mean in Cambulac. His name and what it had come to mean in his own heart.

But the entirety of the list was surely worth enumerating in precise columns and prettied figures. Betrayal became easier to bear under the cool and impartial light of a scholar’s mind.

First, Niccolo took the promise of a joyous childhood: fatherless, with a mother soon to follow to realms beyond Marco’s reach and more permanent still. With each year, the theft of his hopes grew sharper and crueler under the whetstone of a child’s belief in his father’s undying love. _Surely, he will come_. The certain innocence of a child, a gift rendered foul.

Next, his freedom and, in one swift movement, all the hopes Marco had shaped for himself – adventure at his father’s side, and the warm embrace of Venice when he finally returned to narrow buildings and labyrinthine canals.

In his return to Cambulac, Niccolo stole all the world out from under Marco’s feet: his place in the court, the esteem he had earned. His freedom, again, and all he still thought his father might be – what little honour Marco believed the Polo name yet retained, as fleeting as the dying flicker of embers banked under fine ash. Gone, now, gutted to lifeless coal.

In the end, though, it was the theft of Marco’s fury that hurt him most. That set him in the path of the greatest dangers and removed from him his ability to step aside.

Niccolo, with his clever fingers, plucked from Marco’s chest the rage he nursed at his father’s long list of betrayals, as easily as the great adventurer might have taken a coinpurse. In its place, he put a pouch of filial love – the counterweight, as a thief might tuck pebbles inside a man’s pocket – that could, it would seem, never be lost nor destroyed. Even under the auspices of abandonment, the furious flare of being cast aside. Even as Marco wished it, outrage slipped between his fingers, as if he tried to hold smoke in clasped palms.

He said the words, tasted them as bitter on his tongue as gentian root – _you left me in this foreign land and now you have destroyed me_ – but Niccolo, ever the thief, the smuggler in the night, replaced the ache of betrayal and abandonment with the deeper hurt of obligation and the fear of losing what little of Marco’s wide-eyed childhood dream of family yet remained. Even as he called his father coward, the thought rang clear as clarion bells, _I will give my life for this man. Even that, he will have taken from me_.

Because there were many things Marco had learned since his father had left him in the Khan’s care, one of which was the impossibility of changing the shape of his heart. A traitorous heart it might be, prone to softening when it should steel itself. More likely to forgive and seek amnesty than to dole out death when death and fury were rightful rewards.

A heart that, when Marco thought of his death under the hooves of Mongol horses, curved his mind to a fevered dream, to the touch of a finger against his pulse, which grew unsteady with desire. His was a treacherous and dangerous heart, a fitting heart for the son of a thief, and it filled his bones with molten gold at the mere memory of a man, dangerous and intoxicating as the finest of poisons, watching him with a predatory quiet that should have scared Marco. But it did not, or if he did feel the trill of fear in response, it was a fear that set his blood aflame.

Marco could not rightly hold his father responsible for the theft of a dream no less impossible than scaling a mountain to find gods in glorious Dionysian celebration, no less impossible than drawing the sun down from the sky to rest gently upon the scorched earth, and yet that was what cried out at the forefront of his mind as the weight of Niccolo’s thefts pinned him, fixed and unmoving. He should never have the chance to nurse the fevered desires of his own heart, to tend to the delirious cant of his thoughts when he still reeled from the flash of images upon waking – the dark tumble of hair fine as silk, hard fingers bruising Marco’s wrists and dappling heat up the line of his throat, the slick slide of skin against skin.

And yet Marco found respite in the darkest of his hours, in the depths of his despair, but it was a relief incomplete. Pulled from the jaws of death, only to be burdened with the shaping of his father’s fate. A fool’s task, made harder by the sickness of his heart: to allow a thief into his house, only to offer him the last coin in his coffer. To sacrifice what was left of his reputation in Cambulac, his safety in this place, for a man who had been so very quick to leave him alone and without ally.

But the pieces of Marco’s life, once stolen, were as coins passed from hand to hand to hand. Beyond recovery. Beyond even regret: once taken, they were not worth the meagre span of a thought.

He had learned the ways of his own heart, and the same heart that foolishly fixed on desires both treacherous and utterly beyond reach – a princess as distant as the moon and cooler still, a prince more likely to send Marco to a bloodied death than to ever abide his touch – would not see his father killed when he might yet be saved.

It was much the same impulse that had him stop an assassin’s blade to save his captor, a king who would, except for some inexplicable fondness for Marco’s way with words, have seen him dead twice over. Who would kill an innocent in payment for Marco's own sins.

To save a Khan, he would lay down his life. To save his own father, he could do no less, even if it left him, ruined and dying, in some distant corner of the world. His own heart would see him offer no less than all of himself to the altar of great men with greater ambitions still. It was the last thing his father had stolen from himself – his ability to see danger and take steps to avoid it, his care for his own life above those around him who valued his own, in return, so little. For the smuggler and for the Khan, he would plunge into the deepest waters, never to return, even his body beyond salvage and burial. The utter loss of Marco Polo for the salvation of the smuggler, for the well-being of the captor.

A man with so little regard for his own life could not be a man destined to live long, but Marco could do nothing but leave. Could do nothing but try.

*****

Fate was said to be cruel in her ministrations, and Marco was inclined to repeat it, for the sentiment held true. He readied himself for a journey, perhaps a death sentence entirely of his own making, but his preparations were not without unexpected accompaniment.

"Master Polo. This is not a journey I would trust to you, were there other choices to be had." The voice anything but a caress, each syllable gilded with steel, dipped in rendered toxins known only to the finest of alchemists.

Marco twisted, a sharp talon of heat lancing his abdomen – still, his traitorous heart would see him undone, as enraptured by cruelty as by imagined kindness.

"I would see it to completion, my prince, no matter the cost. You doubt my loyalty, but I do not. I would trust its success to no one else."

Prince Jingim stood in the hallway of Marco's gifted house, haloed in soft light and dust. Pale silks skimmed the planes of his body, a soft fur draped around shoulders that were straighter under what had to be the possibility that he might become Khan before Marco could solve the puzzle laid before them.

Authority suited him, in dreaming and waking both.

Marco turned his thoughts to the fabrics under his palms, rolled and tucked into the satchel alongside his journal. Crumpled with a haphazard haste that made no sense. Months of learning to pack with all possible swiftness and efficiency, and the prince made him clumsy as a youth again.

"You mistake me, Latin." The creaking of floorboards as Jingim shifted. A tiger lying in wait, ensuring limber muscles ready for a moment's notice to attack, to maim with dreadful grace. "I do not doubt your loyalty, not when it is your father's life that lay in the balance and my brother by your side, ensuring you are steadfast."

Marco turned again to look at the prince. A picture of predatory calm, certain and still.

Unbidden, a recollection of his dream while bitten. Heat flushed the nape of Marco's neck, warming him uncomfortably, like too much time spent by the fireside until skin grew tight and fevered.

"Then might you give voice to your doubts, my prince?"

If his own voice grew raw around the last two words, it was a weakness forgivable, when such memories – even if only of dreams and of one brief touch – lingered like a haze over his mind.

"Only a fool asks to be sent on a task equal parts unlikely and dangerous, and then on behalf of someone so beneath his consideration."

Marco thought, _And if you but knew who held my consideration, you would think me a greater fool still_. Instead, he stilled his hands, and brought the full measure of his attention to the conversation at hand.

Prince Jingim rarely spoke to him with so little scorn. And now, before he risked his life. Still there was danger hidden artfully in the angles of his body, the timbre of his voice – but Jingim would always be dangerous. It did not mean he could not also have moments in which his claws were sheathed.

These were words worth sharing with due care and thought. Perhaps there would even be one or two to cherish later on, in darker moments. If fate – and Jingim's temperament – might smile on him for but a moment.

“Perhaps I _am_ a fool," Marco said, tasting the words on his tongue, an admission cool and clear like spring water. "He is not the father I dreamed of as a child, nor is he even the man I thought him when he left me – and yet he is the only father I have. I would not see him killed, even for his own folly.”

A flash of tension across the prince's face, storm clouds in the distance across an open plain. “A generosity of spirit that borders on madness, Master Polo. To put yourself at such risk for the life of a man who was quick to give yours away. To value it so little.”

“I have heard it said that all fathers are kings in their sons’ hearts. Surely, you would do the same.”

But this was a misstep. The storm darkened. Thunder sounded. Marco could almost taste the acrid bite of lightning in the air.

But still, Jingim's voice was steady, his shoulders straight. “For my Khan, yes.”

The truth was there, if Marco chose to ride into the roaring tempest, to brave the winds and rains for something worth remembering. So he pushed, stepping closer to the precipice. He stood to lose all; boldness would not be amiss. “For your Khan, but not for your father?”

The prince smiled, then, sunlight breaking through black cloud – the eye of a storm, a thin moment of respite before the onslaught began anew. “A king is glorious, and just reward awaits he who earns it. Fathers are too often fickle in their attentions. And I value my own life than you appear to value yours.”

Marco found his gaze catching on the careful pull of Jingim's hair, black against gold. Underneath his skin hummed lightning and danger. Marco would have more. “That is not a valuation without reason, my prince, and it makes my sacrifice a much smaller thing indeed. You have ridden into battle for your father: you have sustained injury for his ambition and his glory. The price of my life is surely worth no more than that.”

Prince Jingim stilled, the line of his neck tense as a bowstring drawn taut, the shape of his brow marred by what looked to be a moment's confusion. “Surely,” he repeated, drawing the word out in a rumble. “And yet I would caution you to throw your life away for such a man.”

“Not just such a man. For your father as well. For the Khan of Khans." Marco noted, distantly, the feel of his lungs expanding, desperate to capture the air that had been so forcibly knocked out of him. As though he'd taken a hoof to the chest: Jingim, caught off balance by Marco for a breaths span; the golden prince, surprised at the Latin's honesty.

It was a worthy thing to carry with him, if he had no other favors: the prince believed Marco’s life worth more than nothing and was taken aback at Marco's admiration – however couched it was in discussing Marco’s own lack of worth. A memory far grander than a strip of blue silk tucked against his heart, a knowledge that he could yet unsteady the tiger lying in wait.

He continued, finalizing his intent, as though concluding a letter with a final punctuating dot. "The sacrifice of a Latin’s life may save the Khan from danger: that such a thing would be worth my lifeblood is something on which, I am sure, we can find accord.” He nodded, then, the suggestion of a bow in the tilt of his shoulders.

"Yes. In this, we find accord." Jingim's face smoothed over, the picture of calm and dignity. A prince, every inch of him, but Marco knew of the danger prowling beneath the stillness.

He knew, and he wished to see it. To taste it.

Foolish, but then Marco Polo was a fool, his heart a traitor. His failures were to be expected.

"May your journey prove successful, Master Polo, for all our sakes." In a flash of movement, the prince was gone, leaving only the whirls and eddies of dust and dim sunlight in his wake.

"For all our sakes." Marco said the words. Felt them shape his mouth. Unfamiliar and strange, as unsettling and enticing as arriving in Cambulac for the first time, a new world unfolding before him.

Perhaps Niccolo had not taken everything from his son. Perhaps he had gifted him something as well, however thoughtless, however unintentional: the chance to save the lives of two great men with greater ambitions still, and the chance to convince a golden prince that there was, indeed, something worthwhile in the Khan's round-eyed pet.

But first, Marco had to crack open one of the ancient secrets of the world, spill it out as a golden yolk for all to see. Later, he would discover if the theft of his concern for self-preservation meant he would yet learn what danger felt like, scraping against his skin, humming across his tongue, a golden heat that liberated at the same moment it destroyed.

**Author's Note:**

> My wife: "Okay, so does anything _happen_ in this one?"  
>  Me: "Uh, no. I mean, like, they _talk_ and stuff..."  
>  My wife: "Well, get on with it already!"  
> Me: "In the next one! For sure!"


End file.
